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Alanah Pearce spent months conducting interviews with developers to learn if they believe if Twitch is having a negative impact on single player games, GVMERS on The Rise and Fall of SOCOM, Mother's Basement on Detroit Become Human being the worst civil rights allegory, Life Is Strange 2 reveal, Michael Futter tells the story of why the Telltale and Stranger Things deal took two years to happen, former Extra Credits founder and narrator launches New Frame Plus YT channel, Colin Campbell on why companies are afraid of the politics in their games, Maddy Myers toured three esports organizations to see how the teams live, James Dator writes about the life of a Grand Theft Auto role-player, Cameron Kunzelman asks Why Are There So Many Apocalyptic Video Games, Video Game Story Time on the broken heart that inspired Hyper Light Drifter, EU approves copyright law, and more.

This is the second E3 in a row we've gotten to play Skull & Bones, and we're happy to report that the naval combat is shaping up pretty nicely. Here's a slice of the newly announced Hunting Grounds mode which is playable either solo or as part of a pirate gang. (All cutscenes are a WIP.)

Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden is pretty long name for a game with a straightforward pitch: what if XCOM but with animorphs? While it’s based off of a pen and paper role-playing game popular in Sweden during the 80s, developer The Bearded Ladies have made it their own by injecting the inspiration’s DNA into a turn-based tactical game. After close to an hour with Mutant Year Zero, I came away excited to play more, and not just because one of the characters I got to control was a duck in a top hat sporting a crossbow.

Tradition dictates that Rockstar may not discuss the PC version of any of its games, or even admit that they exist, until we’ve all given up any hope of seeing them. So while Red Dead Redemption 2 was unveiled for consoles a while back, there’s been no news for PC. With Rockstar keeping schtum, there was only one hope: LinkedIn. The Keeper of CVs. The Spiller of Secrets. So what say you, LinkedIn? Is Red Dead Redemption 2 doing what the original didn’t and coming to PC?

Leon Kennedy had a very bad first day on the job, and Resident Evil 2’s HD remaster is going to take us through it step by terrifying step. A new gameplay trailer shows a game that’s far darker, scarier, and gorier than its original version, updated with 20 years’ worth of zombie research.

Upcoming strategy-RPG City of The Shroud looks notable enough on a purely mechanical level, but studio Abyssal Arts’s unusual release plans for it are especially interesting. While a concrete ‘definitive’ edition of the game will be launching next year, the initial release this August will be episodic, and the cumulative, democratic choices of all players will determine how the plot of each successive episode will play out, and how a city-wide power struggle will be resolved.

Dying Light 2 takes parkour zombie slaying to a new city, and there’s a reason for that. Where the first game, released in 2015, was about dealing with a viral outbreak in real time, the second will deal with the aftermath years later.

They’re climbing the walls. Hundreds of tiny warriors are using grappling hooks to scale the stone barriers of a Chinese settlement, as I look down on the battlefield from my perch at E3. I bite my lip and pretend to know what I’m doing. Yes, swordsmen, through the breach. Spear dudes, down the middle. Grappling hook men, up you go. Only stinky Romans use anything as primitive as a ladder to assault a city. But oh no, I’ve forgotten my heroes. Three horsemen that are now hundreds of metres away from the action. These units are what Total War: Three Kingdoms is all about. Special warriors, similar to the powerful hero units of the Total War: Warhammer spin-offs. I send them in and they slaughter dozens of soldiers, holding entire battalions at bay. But the enemy has one of these heroes too – Lü Bu. And he LOVES to kill.

Rico Rodriguez is back. He's a little older, a little rougher for the journey, but there's another country that requires his help to reach a state of freedom. This time around, Rico is in the South American nation of Solis, taking on a organization called the Black Hand lead by a woman named Gabriella.

When I last played Police Stories, I was pretty delighted by how much the two level alpha had to offer. So it was with somewhat mixed feelings that a year later I found myself playing a four level alpha – this feels like slow progress, albeit it with a graphical overhaul. And yet I am just as captured and occupied by the levels it has, and really impressed with the improvements made.

Mega Man’s basic abilities are pretty much set in stone, so how do the development team take advantage of this to make a good stage? The latest video detailing the development of Mega Man 11 goes into detail.

Capcom has begun uploading several videos detailing various aspects of the making of Mega Man 11. This week, they revealed more about how Mega Man’s new design was tweaked and changed into the 3D form that is seen in-game.

A unique blend of tactics and tower-defense swung by our E3 2018 stage in the upcoming PS4, Xbox One, PC, and Nintendo Switch game Bad North. We got a live gameplay demo, and you can see exactly how the two genres work together.

You might remember We Happy Few as an inspired, darkly funny trailer about Orwellian office life that didn’t quite carry through to the game that was released in Early Access - a survival and stealth-focused roguelike with little in the way of direct storytelling.

Mechanicus has a couple of challenges ahead of it. One is standing out from all the other Warhammer 40,000 games—we've just had an action-RPG, soon we'll have a 4X that looks a bit like Warlock with orks, there's another turn-based game in Early Access—but developers Bulwark and publisher Kasedo Games have an idea for how to manage that. It's a pretty obvious one: their game won't have any space marines in it.

Xseed Games has officially announced its first otome game, London Detective Mysteria. The game will be heading to the West in Fall 2018. People will be able to get it for the PlayStation Vita or PC. It will also be playable for the first time at Anime Expo 2018 between July 5-8, 2018 in Los Angeles, CA.

Level-5 has revealed Inazuma Eleven Ares anime will be getting a worldwide release. In a press release, the company notes that the reboot series will launch in Europe in Fall 2018. It also says that a North American debut will begin in 2019. The show is currently airing in Japan.

Redout, the F-Zero and Wipeout-inspired racer, is returning next year, and it’s looking a little different. Redout: Space Assault ditches the fixed racetracks of yesterday’s future, and instead heads out into orbit for frenetic stellar battles between dogfighting spaceships.

"Development on games can’t just pause indefinitely and pick back up again; it doesn’t work that way. Especially when you have no idea when that future date will occur. We can’t keep building content that may never see the light of day. That’s bad business."

Naoki Yoshida has become an icon to Final Fantasy XIV fans. When he logs into the game, his character gets mobbed. One of the reasons for his popularity is his willingness to get candid about all of the issues his game faces.

Divinity: Original Sin 2 is already a very good game - easily one of last year’s best, and in the running for any shortlist of RPGs. Never ones to sit on their laurels, Larian Studios has made significant improvements to Original Sin 2 to prepare for the game’s console release, and just about all of them will benefit PC players.

Despite developing a roster of more than 140 champions, League of Legends developer Riot Games has no plans to slow down. In an interview, lead game designer Andrei ‘Meddler’ Van Roon told PCGN that “there’s an enormous amount of things we still want to do.”

In the next chapter of the fight for control of the Star Control series, original series creators Fred Ford and Paul Reiche have started a Gofundme fundraiser for the estimated $2 million they need to defend themselves against Stardock, which is suing them for the rights to the franchise.

It’s easy enough to make a bot that can trounce a human player in a first-person shooter – just react faster and shoot straighter – but anything strategic presents a fresh set of exceptionally complex problems. To this day, few Starcraft or Dota bots could rival a decently skilled player or group, at least until now. AI research group OpenAI reckon that their Dota 2 bot team (dubbed OpenAI Five) is nearly good enough to give the pros a run for their money, and will be testing that theory this August at The International 2018.

Yesterday, the European Parliament’s Committee on Legal Affairs voted to approve a controversial new copyright directive that, if made into law, could change the internet as we know it. Just one of the many potential terrible results of the directive, which tasks companies to monitor user-submitted content for copyright infringement, could be a radical alteration of games like Minecraft or Roblox.

(Brought to you by Dr Pepper) In the fourth episode of our Overwatch League series, we talk to the players at the heart of the esport, reflecting on the risks they've taken to become pros, how their lifestyles have changed, and whether it was all worth it.

Every day is Christmas at the Philadelphia Fusion esports mansion. The team’s marketing and content director Hung Tran gestured to the towering decorated pine tree to the right of the front door by way of explaining the joke: the pro gamers who live here get whatever they want and do whatever they want. But Christmas wouldn’t seem as exciting if it happened every day.

Crowdfunding News (not sharing everything I find, just ones that look interesting, have known talent behind them, and a chance to succeed)

At every video game event I’ve been to for the past six months, including this year’s E3, I’ve asked a wide variety of game developers about the future of single-player games. Even though we’re still getting enormous single-player successes like God of War, it’s undeniably easier to monetize multiplayer experiences, and I think that’s how this fear of the “death of single player games” has shown up in pockets of the gaming community. The notion even goes back to 2011, with Mark Cerny, lead architect of the PlayStation 4, saying: “Right now you sit in your living room and you’re playing a game by yourself – we call it the sp mission or the single-player campaign. In a world with Facebook I just don’t think that’s going to last.”

There’s a famous line that often gets quoted in this situations. Slavoj Žižek, adapting a phrase from Fredric Jameson, says that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. What he means is that capitalism structures our lives to such a degree that it is easier to imagine nothing than it is to imagine that the thing that structures our day-to-day relations with each other, with the things we eat and use, and with our very labor might disappear. Keep this in mind when we start talking about video games again.

Game publishers are lathering their productions with the stark imagery of modern political divisions, while at the same time denying any topical intent.

Their strategy, according to industry sources ranging from developers to publicists, is to profit from emotive societal divisions, while ducking difficult conversations about what their works might signify. Their games garner publicity and a sense of cultural relevance, but the companies avoid the challenge and expense of controversy.

Clancy died in 2013 but, like H.P. Lovecraft, he is very much with us today, a cranky, long-since-rampant AI at the heart of the military-entertainment complex. Books are still written in his name, chiselled with Old Testament grandeur atop each volume while that of the surrogate author languishes below the title. There's an Amazon show on the boil starring Jack Ryan, the CIA wonk turned president who is Clancy's most famous creation. Above all, Clancy's spectre continues to haunt video games, from tactical sims like Splinter Cell and Ghost Recon to the many shooters that take inspiration from his love of spec ops jargon and high-fidelity hardware.

Adriel Wallick, the former satellite engineer turned game dev and jam organizer, kicked off Practice 2018 with a talk about the rapid project development inherent to jamming. In introducing her, Professor Clara Fernandez-Vera described Wallick as "a true adventurer," praising the winding path that took her on a global journey -- from Lockheed Martin to Harmonix and Rock Band Blitz, to being a full time indie and leading game jams.

While making this game, I was interested in what it means to appropriate a game genre with queer intent, and I wanted to figure out why the brawler genre would be a good fit for this kind of aesthetic. Some of my early prototyping and design direction is already covered in an earlier post. I wanted something that recognizably belonged to the arcade era, while staying fairly simple and accessible to a general audience.

While most of the game industry was bustling about the Los Angeles Convention Center at E3, news was breaking away from the show. Telltale Games and Netflix were pushed into a clumsy reveal that the companies are teaming up for new projects, including a game based on Netflix original series “Stranger Things.”

You probably have your own idea of who “the troops” are. Maybe that idea was molded by repeated showings of M.A.S.H, the works of Tom Clancy, or films like The Hurt Locker. But just who are America’s soldiers, individually? What do they do when they’re not patrolling bases, running drills, or fighting on the battlefield?

The cultist as a character has always been unknowable. Born like any other, clothed and fed and sheltered and taught, but somehow different. In virtually all fiction, there is something inhuman in the portrayal of the cultist. More than just an outsider, the attitude of a cultist is otherworldly. Their compulsive, obsessive, self-destructive nature is alien, especially tied to the eldritch, existential horror they often try to understand and invoke.

In the early days of the PlayStation 2, Zipper Interactive would debut a third-person shooter called SOCOM U.S. Navy SEALs. Authentic, tactical, team-based, and online at a time where few other PlayStation titles were, SOCOM took the home console by storm. It gave Sony’s exclusives a more mature face, provided multiplayer-centric shooters a new standard to compete against, and helped single-handedly move the PlayStation 2’s network adapter and headset into gamers’ homes. The debut of SOCOM 2 the following year created an immediate classic, and confirmed SOCOM as a franchise that would be with PlayStation for years to come – even as unsavoury hackers attempted to ruin players’ enjoyment.

In this short from our time at Bethesda Game Studios, we talk to Emil Pagliarulo about his experience designing The Dark Brotherhood questlines for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion & The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.

The story of Alx Preston is one of the most interesting in indie gaming. Born with a congenital heart defect, Alx (or Alex if you want to spell his name the boring way!) has a short life expectancy, and needs frequent medical attention.

Rather than wallow in self-pity, Alx has used his pain and fear to create Hyper Light Drifter, a soulful, emotional video game that explores themes of life, death, and everything in between.

Losing isn’t fun. Or is it? What if I told you that the many differnt ways we can lose in video games actually makes them more fun? Specifically, failure in videogames is really important when it comes to emotional communication.

You've heard it before: playing a game, then someone saying that "you're playing it wrong." Time to see what this actually means, why we believe games have a "right way" to play, and what gamers and developers do when hearing about a game being played in a different way. Today, we're looking at game design and intention through the lens of playing a game "wrong."

In this 2018 GDC session, Hitsparks Games' Chris Tang talks about the death and rebirth of Primal Rage II, an arcade sequel that seemed doomed to obscurity, but found redemption in the hands of dedicated fans.

DeAndre Ayton is projected to be the #1 pick in this year’s NBA draft. He’s going to have all summer to get ready for the 2018-19 season, but he (or his social media person) might also take that time to also put in some work on their video game marketing skills.